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Smarter Customers Demand Smarter Analytics

There’s no question that your customers have become increasingly knowledgeable about the types of products and services they can and should expect from your company. With this in mind, contact centers are quickly changing their approach to customer interactions. Understanding that your customers are coming to you expecting more than ever before can help you better anticipate the level of service you need to be prepared with to support them. The silver lining is that the valuable customer information you need to make the best decisions is already available to be mined, analyzed and processed to ensure the most positive customer experience. Having the right analytics tools is the key to unlocking this invaluable data.

Below are three areas that the contact center will have to develop their analytics in order to better satisfy the needs of their customers:

Ensuring that your agents are well prepared to speak about your products and services

One of the worst things that an agent can do in the contact center is to take a call unprepared. It signals to the customer that your company isn’t prepared to help them, or, perhaps even worse, that you don’t care enough to ensure your agents are up-to-date on the current trends. Fortunately, through the use of post-call interaction analytics, your company can gain a better understanding of what aspects of your products or services are causing customers to contact you. Armed with that insight, you can then provide your agents the best information about those issues when customers do call in.

Using real time analytics to gain a better understanding of how to handle competitive mentions while on a call with a customer

Regardless of your company’s industry, the competitive landscape has become more crowded and, as a result, this is making it increasingly difficult to differentiate your company from others. Your customers understand this as well, and are contacting you expecting the kind of instant information they can get online. It is vitally important that your agents are not only as up-to-date as possible on your competitors’ information, but also how to best handle competitive mentions while on a call. The major question, then, is how you can best provide your agents with the information they need when they need it?

The good news is that the answer is right there in your contact center. By analyzing the millions of previous interactions that contain competitive mentions, your company can begin to find those agents that handled those calls the most effectively and build a series of best practices around their behaviors. In doing so, you can design scripts for overcoming objections or for how to best offer an alternative solution. The next step to offering the most effective customer services revolves around providing that information as the call is happening with real-time analytics.

Optimizing real-time customer care with intelligent analytics

One of the best ways your contact center can react to the changing customer is to provide your agents with the most up-to-date information during interactions. Intelligent interaction analytics tools that actively enable your agents to adapt correct behaviors in real time can help. If an agent is talking to a customer with technical issues, these systems can help make sure that the agent doesn’t skip any troubleshooting steps before sending out a technician. Or the real-time system can help ensure that the agent is disclosing all the fine print items necessary when making a sale or upgrading a customer’s services. This way, you make sure that nothing gets overlooked in your contact center and your customers are being given the best service possible.

At the end of the day, maximizing customer loyalty and satisfaction is the key. Complacency in your contact centers gives your competition an unnecessary advantage. The worst thing that a company can do is to become complacent. As your customers become more active and knowledgeable about your particular industry, it is vital that your company respond in kind. Doing so will ensure that you will provide the right product or service more efficiently, increase your bottom line and keep your customers happy, loyal and satisfied.

As Nexidia’s Vice President of Marketing, Jon has leadership responsibility for all branding, marketing, and public relations. Jon brings more than 17 years of experience leading marketing, product management and strategic business development for organizations across a number of vertical markets, including telecommunications, cloud services, and digital advertising. Jon holds an MBA from Goizueta Business School at Emory University, and earned his undergraduate degree in management from the Georgia Institute of Technology.